The Analogue Years

In which I reckon with my formative era as a listener of music

Hope has been urging me to write about the way that I listen to music nowadays. Because apparently it’s somewhat insane? 

But as I began to describe my current listening habits, I couldn’t help but consider their contrast to how I listened in the past - as a little kid, as a teenager, and as a young adult. Memories burst out like a wall of sound, and I recognized just how distant that past has become. I wonder if there’s something to gain from revisiting these long-ago routines as a counterpoint to the digital present we could hardly have imagined back then.  

During my youngest years, there was a big ‘70s stereo system in our living room. One of my earliest memories is of twisting its chunky aluminum knobs to watch the radio pointer move up and down the spectrum, with no idea what the movement was meant to signify. The module mostly collected dust, except on the occasional nights when my dad would plug in the coiled cable of his massive headphones and lay back on his recliner zoning out to the oldies station. He’d call me over whenever a classic novelty song came on - “They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” or “Monster Mash” or the Irish one where the unicorns farted around too long to get on Noah’s ark - and I’d sit there feeling like some sort of alien astronaut as sound filled up the hemispheres of this hefty headset.  

My parents kept a modest record collection - Beatles, Dylan, Sinatra - but no one ever put them on. Instead, I had a little suitcase record player in my room, which was originally used for my small stack of storybook 45s (“When you hear the chime, it’s time to turn the page”). But it also played LPs, and at around age five I spent long hours spinning my favorites over and over while playing board games against myself: Sesame Street Gold, The Magical Music of Walt Disney, Chipmunk Punk. A few years later, during the Michael Jackson craze of second grade, I got Thriller on cassette, though I only listened to it straight through once or twice. A tape that got more love was “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, the lyrics of which I would act out with my toys (such as an elaborate rendition of “Nature Trail to Hell” performed by He-Man figures). 

Not my original cassette, obviously, but I was thrilled to find it on vinyl recently

But these albums were exceptions - for the most part, music was something we listened to in the car. This meant either Big D 103 (my dad’s oldies) or “Magic” 104: Lite FM. Any flavor of what was truly popular came from TV - shows like Entertainment Tonight and Radio 1990 gave me an idea of the songs that existed beyond our trips to the store. MTV was strictly banned in my house, but it exerted a magnetic fascination. As I got older I would sneak viewings when my parents were out or otherwise occupied - though I’d often get caught by forgetting to change the channel back to something anodyne before I switched off the set. 

Around fifth grade, I decided I wanted to start listening to music on my own. Feeling that it would be the edifying, responsible choice, I began to explore classical music. At bedtime, I’d turn on my clock radio and tune into 89.9 - “Your Ecumenical Station” - which played classical blocks in the evening hours. It was soothing but largely incomprehensible to me, and I never developed a deep appreciation for it. I was a timid, conservative kid - MTV notwithstanding - so I followed my parents’ lead and turned the dial to “Magic” 104, where I spent many an afternoon doing my math homework to the strains of Chicago, Toto, the Alan Parsons Project, England Dan & John Ford Coley, and so many others. 

In sixth grade, I made a friend at my new middle school who was blind and very interested in music. The first time he came over, he asked if my parents had any records. So I pulled out their old LPs and read them off to him - he had to correct me when I mentioned Bob “DYE-lin.” His special enthusiasm was the Beatles, so I dusted off the turntable and put on Sergeant Pepper. It was ear-opening for me - Big D 103 had favored early Beatles, and the baroque weirdness of their later era took me by surprise. Somehow we got deep into the Paul Is Dead conspiracy and spent that entire summer poring over Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album on the hunt for clues. We even recorded some of the records onto cassettes and tried selling our bootlegs to classmates, though I don’t recall any buyers. 

I still have these from my parents’ collection

When school came back into session, I realized, sizzling with hormones, that I might have a better shot at connecting with my peers if I graduated to more popular fare. So I finally ditched the lite FM and started toggling between two top 40 stations, 96-TIC and 95.7 KSS-FM. Listening for the first time to music that wasn’t made for little kids or my parents was an almost religious experience. I could write a whole essay about the songs that dazzled my pubescent brain in the fall of 1988. I sat up in the dark late into the night, listening to Erasure and INXS and Bobby Brown and Taylor Dayne, imagining what my life as an adult was going to be like. Soon, I was scanning the full dial for songs I liked across all radio formats and capturing them on tape to listen to at my leisure. 

I also started buying cassettes on my own. The first I can remember purchasing with my own money, square in the middle of my adult contemporary phase, was Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, and I spent a seventh-grade class trip to Colonial Williamsburg playing my sister’s Tiffany tape on repeat. But then, a year later, I was visiting a cousin who played me Cosmic Thing by the B-52s. I knew “Love Shack” from the radio, and it was alright, but I was not prepared for the other songs she played me that day - cartoony and harmonious, angular and exotic. It was music that felt made specifically for me. I immediately asked to borrow it and held onto it for weeks before buying my own copy. It was the first album that I felt compelled to listen to day and night. My little cassette boombox sat right next to my bed, and however tired I was, I always dutifully flipped the tape over (from “Follow Your Bliss” to the title track, or from “Junebug” to “Roam”) until finally falling asleep. 

I spent the following months trolling the local record stores - Sam Goody, Strawberries, Coconuts - tracking down all of the previous B-52s albums until I had a complete set. I was intrigued that the band didn’t always sound as slick and lush as they did in 1989 - their earlier stuff was somehow even stranger, like radio dispatches from an alternative past. It was jarring and exciting to realize that there was older music that had completely passed my parents by, sitting around on retail shelves waiting for me. 

And then a new bomb hit: my first mix tape. I had gathered a number of far-flung pen pals via the letters columns of Marvel comics, one of whom was another ninth-grader who lived in Manhattan. She sent me a tape in the mail, and as soon as I put it on I was rendered breathless by unfamiliar sounds. I didn’t see at first that she’d written out all the songs on the inside of the folding insert, so for a full month I listened without any idea who the artists were, which only increased the potency of their magic. This compilation introduced me to the Cure, the Replacements, the Stone Roses, and other artists I grew to love. 

I’ve managed to hold onto this for more than 30 years

Once I understood you could curate your own musical experiences for yourself and your friends, there was no turning back. Over the course of high school I made hundreds of tapes for anyone who expressed the slightest interest. I expanded my own repertoire along the way, developing a deep hunger for whatever new sounds a socially awkward teen in the cultural no-man’s-land of central Connecticut could get his ears around. New artists entered the repertoire - They Might Be Giants (my first concert!), Elvis Costello, Talking Heads. But despite forging in a more “alternative” direction, I still spent a lot of time with the radio, making very little distinction between what was popular and what was cool. 

Oddly, I missed a major opportunity to deepen my tastes in college. Though I attended a small liberal-arts school where musical taste could be a blood sport, I ended up falling into the theater department, which was like an island of misfits within a sea of misfits. While many of my classmates were chastising each other’s purity of taste and delving into the most exclusive of obscurities, my theater friends were blissfully awash in synthesized nostalgia. During my first semester, I made an ‘80s mix that provided me with an entree into a group of upper-classmen, who were impressed by my selection of half-forgotten classics from TEN WHOLE YEARS earlier! Though I still invested some attention in newer artists, I spent the next few years focused mostly on this performative manipulation of the familiar - to the point where I completely missed out on bands playing at our school who would later become favorites (STEREOLAB, for god’s sake!)l, because I had no idea who they were. 

A few of the mixes I hand-decorated in college

But my horizons opened right back up again shortly after graduation. Hope and I invited a friend to share our tiny off-campus apartment, and soon our entire living was filled with his racks of CDs. He’d spent a semester off working at a Minneapolis record store where, thanks to various discounts (employee and five-fingered), he had amassed an astonishing CD collection that cut across every imaginable genre. He’d play us early jazz, hardcore psychedelia, avant-garde composition - I remember some nights just walking up to his racks and playing whatever I randomly pointed at. We listened to everything from Belle and Sebastian to Amon Düül II to Harry Partch to Stuff Smith to the 13th Floor Elevators to Meredith Monk. When it was time for us to move, I spent a week recording as many of his albums as possible onto tape so I could listen to them in NYC. 

Tracklist of a mix my eclectic friend made for me before moving in - the tape itself is long missing

Not that I needed to worry - the city had plenty to offer. On the one hand there was the accessibility of high-class record shops - the first time I walked into Other Music I said, “What is this amazing record you’re playing?” and suddenly the Brazilian psychedelic tropicalia band Os Mutantes had a new lifelong fan. Other days, I’d flip through the used CDs at Kim’s and just buy whatever looked cool. At the same time, I was getting deep into 91.1 WFMU - “The Freeform Station of the Nation” - which broadcast an astoundingly eclectic array of DJ-driven obsessions out of Jersey City. Depending on when you tuned in, you could hear anything from garage rock to reggae to an hour of grating bleeps and squonks. This was a far cry from “Magic” 104, and I was constantly reaching for scrap paper to jot down the name of a new artist or album to check out. (WFMU still broadcasts live and streams and archives all their old shows and it’s one of the most important cultural artifacts of our time - check them out if you’re not already familiar!)

And then the digital revolution came around, which is when I lost my mind completely. But this post is too long already, so let’s pick up the second half of the story in an upcoming post.